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Using Cellphones to Track Your Kids
David Pogue at the New York Times wrote this week about a new, novel use for cellphones: tracking your children. Several new ventures, including ones from names like Disney, Verizon, and Sprint, will offer web-accessible locating services by pinpointing the G.P.S. signal in their commercial devices. There's also some discussion of child-specific services, like the 'Whereifone', which is more 'Star Trek communicator' than actual cell. From the article: "To pinpoint the phone's location, you call up the Web site, enter your password, click 'locate,' and presto: an icon appears on a map -- either a street map or actual satellite photo. In the photo view, you can zoom in enough to see individual buildings. These are existing satellite photos --you won't actually see your child standing there -- but this feature is still creepy and awesome. You can even watch 'bread crumbs' appear on the map as the phone moves around (cost: one talk-time minute apiece). That could be helpful if you're trying to assist someone lost on the road, or in the kinds of emergencies encountered primarily in your nightmares."
Kids are clever these days. They'll soon realize they can turn their phones off to go places parents shouldn't know about. Or let the battery drain, so they don't get blamed when they get home ("oops, I forgot to recharge it! sorry...").
Heck, one of my friend's kid even uses an ultrasonic ringtone so his teacher at school can't tell the phone is ringing. Apparently, it's based on the fact that adults can't hear high frequencies children can. Kids are clever and have always been. If they want to do something, they will, and no amount of technology you can graft on them will change that.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
If a kid doesn't want to be tracked, he won't be. Star Trek has only covered this about 12 times by now...if Security can simply ask the Computer where you are, take off your communicator and leave it wherever you're "supposed" to be (like confined to quarters). A kid may do one better by removing the battery.
Still, this is a disturbing trend. What good can come from it? Paranoid parents are paying extra for this technology to avoid potential troubles that are, let's face it, unlikely. Meanwhile, the kid gets so sick and tired of being interrogated about his every move that he decides to ditch his phone: thus robbing him of a real asset when a typical problem does occur (like car trouble in the middle of nowhere).
"Microsoft killed my company, I hold a personal grudge. I don't use Microsoft products and neither should you."-JWZ
What's a SIM?
Oh, that must be some weird non-American thing used to allow people to use a phone with different providers. We don't do that over here. I think there's one provider that uses SIM, and it's not one of the ones planning on providing this service.
In the US, cellphones literally have the logo of their provider on them. No, I don't mean "Nokia" - I mean my cellphone has a Sprint logo on it and only works on the Sprint network. There's no way for me to use the phone with any other Sprint account, let alone any other service provider.
So, in the US, if you want to use another number, you have to buy a new phone. You can't transfer phones between service providers. Hell, a given phone model is frequently tied to a service provider. Cingular offers Motorola phones. Sprint uses Samsung. With Verizon you can get LG.
Yay capitalism.
I read once that laws in the US require cellular carriers to calculate handset position using the distance between the handset and three cellular base stations. I think the intention is to give positional information to emergency services.
More recently phones in the US have been required to incorporate a GPS receiver, possibly because such triangulation does not always work too well (especially with some US specific cellular systems). This information is available to the network, even if it is not accessible to the phone's user.
Nah, back in the 50's people just didn't talk about it so much. There are and will always be places where people look out for each other and places where they don't. I personally think this is worthless for any sort of kidnapping - the abducter will just toss the phone at the first chance.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"